I was watching one of those what’s-great-at-Costco-today videos and it briefly showed an external hard drive, capacity 14 TB. I found it on the Costco web site, currently for $150 instead of $200. Who on earth shopping at Costco needs 14 TB of storage? My mind boggles. Or maybe I’m just behind the times.
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Out of stock here, but I could see partitioning it into as many as needed for video projects, room to play… But it is a spinner, so things do wear out, but as a backup, not too hazardous…
I just reformatted, set up a 3 Tb spinner, an old WD MyBook, for DW’s new iMac, knowing she’ll never use all the space, but, I split it in half, one clone, one for Mac’s Time Machine… Should be good for a long time… And it saved me having to buy a replacement!
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I have to cringe when I see prices like that. Years ago I ran a bulletin board and needed more space so I bought a 1 gig external hard drive. I think I paid in the neighborhood of $1,400-$1,500.
I recouped some of the cost because I eventually added a second phone line and went from a freebie BBS to a paid BBS.
Regards,
ImAGolfer (retired '03)
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I was a programmer on IBM mainframe computers for 30 years, starting 1976. The mainstay drive for much of that time was their 3380 hard drive.
IBM introduced the first hard disk drive to break the 1GB barrier in 1980. It was called the IBM 3380 and could store 2.52GB (“2.52 billion characters of information,” according to IBM). Its cabinet was about the size of a refrigerator and the whole thing weighed in at 550 pounds (250 kg). It gave users rapid access to a large amount of data, thanks to transferring information at three million characters per second.
My phone has 100 times that much storage (256GB).
I’m feeling old.
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My wife does for her pictures.
Cheers
Qazulight
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That ain’t nuttin’. You can buy a 256 GB micro SD card for 14 bucks, or double it for 10 bucks more!
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In 1985/6, one of those, we had a 67MB hard drive at work that repeatedly failed. So we were told to toss it and replace it with a new drive. I asked my boss if I could take the junked drive and he said “sure”. I brought it home and spent a week or two debugging it. Finally I determined that it had a bunch of bad sectors in particularly bad places. I wrote a small program (this took a while because I had to figure out how to use the driver correctly) to slowly step through the drive and check each sector briefly. I then tried to find out how to “block out” bad sectors. But a friend told me that there was some sort of utility program out there that does that for you. So I scoured the back of my PC World magazines (I was a subscriber from the first issue) and found a utility, ordered it via mail, couple weeks later the floppy arrives, and it worked perfectly. Took a while, but scanned the ENTIRE drive, blocked out the bad sectors, reformatted using only the good sectors, and then … I had a perfectly working, slightly smaller than 67MB hard drive.
In those years, a 67MB hard drive cost a few thousand bucks!
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You got into PCs before I did. My first one, at work, was a Compaq 386/20, with a card that let it work as a mainframe 3270 terminal. (And a Sony Trinitron monitor.) That was probably early '87. At that time that system was on the cover of every magazine. My first home system was a near match for that, but from Gateway. Again, that was all over the magazines.
A few months back I was thinking about Apple II hard drives, and looking at my workstation which has maybe 12TB of disk space (probably soon to be upgraded, I have some more SSDs lying around the house unused).
I asked myself “How many of the old Apple II hard drives that were ever sold, if you added up their capacity, could fit on my workstation’s current drives?”
I think the answer might be “all of them” but I haven’t found a reliable number for “how many hard drives were sold for Apple IIs over the years.”
But if you have even a few of those 14TB Costco drives, surely that would be enough to match the capacity of all those 5MB and 10MB drives…|
I feel old too. 
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By then I was ten years into the mission. Man, I really feel old. There was a little company called PCs Limited, run by some kid named Michael out of his dorm room… they had a much cheaper alternative to that Compaq. My college roommate bought one of his systems, it worked pretty well. I think the kid’s last name was Dell…
Trinitron monitors were glorious, though. Never owned one, just drooled over them.
I also remember an original IBM 8088-based PC that had some kind of 3270 emulator hardware embedded and a special keyboard, that was from about 1984, summer job… Rows of extra function keys on the keyboard.
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That sounds like Steve Gibson/Gibson Research Corp.'s “Spinrite” utility. Saved many a system for me over the years, until drives just became too vast for repair times to be reasonable.
He’s still out there, remarkably.
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It’s quite possible it was that one. I recall that it took a LONG time to run until it finished, but the hard drive worked perfectly after it was done.